Thursday, September 29, 2011

Shredded Chicken with Jalapeno Cream

I bought a new cookbook the other and I'm in love with it. Not that I wasn't in love my old cookbooks but...well...they were old. Shameful, I know, to just abandon my old faithfuls for a new book with no grease or tomato splatters and a firm spine but I did. My new book is wonderful, full of recipes that require no paleo tweaking and others that will require minor adjustments. I bookmarked 10 recipes after a cursory review and got right to work on two of them today. They turned out really well despite my botching of the second recipe rendering it a distant cousin of the recipe I started off with. That's why I love cooking, sometimes you screw it up and yet things will still turn out just fine...most of the time. Oh, the name of my book! It's Eat Cuban: Recipes from Floridita by Andy Rose.

For the first recipe I decided to try a poultry recipe. Now the original called for duck but I went with chicken. Also I cheated big time and bought a rotisserie bird to save a little time.

Shredded Chicken with Jalapeno Cream Sauce

For the chicken:

1 rotisserie chicken, meat pulled and shredded

1 onion, sliced

2 garlic cloves, diced

1 bell pepper, diced

2T. fat of choice

4T sherry

2 roma tomatoes; peeled, seeded and sliced into strips

1T parsley, chopped

1. Heat the fat in a large skillet and add the onion, garlic and pepper. Cook at med-low heat and sweat until soft.

2. Stir in the sherry and increase the heat to high until the liquid is reduced by half.

3. Add the tomato and parsley, stir to mix. Remove from heat.

4. Add the shredded chicken to the skillet and mix well. (You may have to turn the heat back on to warm the chicken up.)

For the jalapeno cream:

1t. garlic, diced

2T shallots, diced

2T. fat of choice

2T sherry

1/2 C. chicken stock

1/2 C. coconut cream

1 to 2 jalapenos, diced

1T chives, chopped

1. Over low heat sweat the garlic and shallots in the fat until for about 5 minutes.

2. Add the sherry and increase the heat to high, boil for about 2 minutes.

3. Add the chicken stock and boil until the liquid is reduced by half.

4. Stir in the coconut cream and jalapeno. Reduce the heat to medium and cook until the sauce is reduced by half. Remove from heat and allow to cool a little.